Inspired by the Arcane Pattern Crafter recently added to Thaumcraft 5, I'd like to request a similar drawer.

This drawer will be able to craft recipes that use only a single type of item as input, in one of a number of preset crafting patterns, such as single item, 2x2, 3 horizontal, 3 vertical, et cetera. The pattern can be player-selected, ideally using a simple right-click on the face of the drawer. The drawer's face would look similar to the Compacting Drawer, except that the bottom-right drawer slot shows the currently selected pattern.

In Vanilla, this drawer would be usable for many common recipes, including logs to planks, planks to sticks, planks to chests, smooth stone to stone bricks, stone bricks to slabs, and those to chiseled stone.

The drawer could have a half-drawer's worth of storage for the input item, and a quarter-drawer's storage for the result. I imagine it would be satisfying to set up a pattern crafter to make slabs from any suitable block, and shift-click the result part of the drawer to craft and draw out exactly 64 slabs, leaving the remaining two in storage.

For extra credit, allow these drawers to be chained by stacking them vertically, so that logs->planks on top of planks->sticks will automatically craft planks as needed, when you try to take sticks from the bottom drawer.

I'm... honestly not sure what is the best way for the drawer controller to report the stock counts (if at all) for these craftable items, with or without the extra credit option.

This belongs to a family of ideas I've been chewing on for a while.

Once you take the first step, I think you'll quickly find the experience not completely there. If the crafting drawers also hold their material, and you want to setup say multiple drawers for different plank-based recipes, you need to divvy up your inventory between the blocks. Cycling patterns beyond the initial setup is probably more hassle than alternative crafting.

So that leads into the natural extension -- why don't these drawers take the inventory from the network? Like a super crafting frame on an IO block. But then you probably wouldn't want the drawer to store a source inventory, and there's some balance questions.

Reporting is tricky, but compacting drawers already have this problem. They do report full inventories for all slots, which causes some friction with AE2 autocrafting. I generally like the idea of reporting everything because other machines and networks can take advantage of it, but there's always a small risk of a bad interaction. I guess this is more of a distinction between manual crafting (and storage) vs. an autocrafting solution, of which compacting drawers are.

I like the idea, I just need to be sure everything is thought out.

Good points. This was just a quick thought after seeing the Arcane Pattern Crafter.

Like a super crafting frame on an IO block.

Mostly, I'd like a crafting drawer to avoid the minor inconveniences of crafting frames: The crafting frame spits items out into the world instead of placing them into your inventory, and when shift-clicking a frame, it will craft as many as it can to fill a stack, even if this produces more than a stack of items. (Think crafting Redstone from MagicalCrops's Essence of Redstone, 12 to a craft, so shift-clicking gives you a stack plus 8 more). A drawer would be able to hold those leftovers and give them back the next time you use it.

I've never actually used the frames so I lack the details :) The main thing being that had access to the full network.